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Whooping Cough Back With a Vengeance in California

Callie Van Tornhout was about a month old when her mother noticed that she’d developed a dry cough on a Sunday afternoon in January.

Soon the cough worsened, and Callie became pale and started throwing up, Callie’s mother, Katie Van Tornhout told ABC News. By the middle of the week, Callie stopped breathing in her mother’s arms in a pediatrician’s waiting room and was rushed to the hospital.

On Saturday, less than a week after the cough first appeared, Callie died at 37 days old on Jan. 30, 2010. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that tests confirmed the culprit: whooping cough.

That year, the country was in the midst of a major whooping cough outbreak, and all eyes were on California, which was experiencing its largest outbreak in 60 years. But the cough hit other states, too, including Minnesota and Callie’s state: Indiana.

“The CDC was like, ‘Didn’t you have the TDaP vaccine when you were pregnant?'” Van Tornhout recalled. “We didn’t know what that was.”